Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour Read Free Book Online Page A

father, who was a wealthy self-made man, pulled me aside and said:
    “Look here, son, there’s no future for you in political science. The best jobs for political science graduates are at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But positions like ambassadorships and director generals and whatever else belong to the relatives of the Shah and his royal court. They won’t even make you a mere clerk.”
    My father was absolutely right, and that is why I disagreed with him. He went on to say:
    “What’s more, if you study political science, because you are a very emotional person, there is a good chance you will end up joining some antigovernment political group, you’ll become a Communist, an urban guerrilla, and you’ll end up having to deal with the secret police. By the time they’re done with you, if you are not executed or sentenced to life in prison, because of the hot baked potatoes and the Coca-Cola bottles they have shoved up your ass, you’ll be walking funny for the rest of your life … Go to America, study engineering or medicine, and become the pride of your family and your country.”
    At the time, I could not tell my father that I did not want to become a Communist, nor did I want to be an ambassador … Therefore, against his advice, I went and studied political science. I wanted to go as far as a doctorate degree, but first came the revolution, then the war, and I who wanted to become a great writer told myself that many of the world’s great writers have experienced war, and so I signed up for military service and volunteered to go to the front. The first outcome of the Iran-Iraq War was millions of dead and disabled; the second outcome was that right after peace was established we realized that we were two Muslim countries and therefore brothers. It seems the war also wanted to offer the world another great writer, and for this reason, after eighteen months, it sent me back to my hometown, Shiraz, alive and well. And I, who even in the trenches had spent my time reading novels from the farthest reaches of the world —The Soul Enchanted, David Copperfield, Moulin Rouge, Resurrection, and … and … and had not stopped the exercise of writing, was fully armed and ready to write my first masterpieces and to present them to the world.
    Ask me:
    Was all this self-praise, as with other bigheaded writers, just to claim you are a great writer?
    And I will answer:
    You are wrong again. No, I didn’t say all this to suggest that I am a great writer. I said it all to explain why I have not become a great writer. In other words, I want to say that I was just another young man with Great Expectations of my future as a writer. In 1990, I was thrilled to learn that on the advice of Hooshang Golshiri, one of Iran’s great writers, a reputable private publisher had agreed to publish the second collection of my short stories, titled The Eighth Day of the Earth. Every day I sat waiting for the telephone to ring so that I could hear my publisher’s voice telling me that my book had been printed. I waited for almost a year, until one day I finally heard his voice on the telephone.
    “Shahriar! We’re screwed! I’m ruined … The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has complained of thirteen separate points in your book—all sexy words and phrases … You have to come to Tehran. What a mistake I made investing in a young writer. My capital … I’m ruined!”
    I kept thinking, When did I ever write sexy stories? I could not come up with an answer, so I quickly got on the bus and headed for Tehran. The six-hundred-mile road between Shiraz and Tehran passes by the two-thousand-five-hundred-year-old ruins of Persepolis, it passes by Isfahan, one of the most beautiful cities in Iran which some five hundred years ago served as the capital city of the Safavid Dynasty, it passes by the religious city of Qom, which is the center for educating and producing clergymen, and it passes by two great deserts as well. During the